LibreTexts: A Community Platform for Adopting and Creating Geoscience OER

Wednesday 4:30pm-5:45pm TSU - Humphries: 118
Poster Session Part of Wednesday

Author

Joshua Halpern, LibreTexts
LibreTexts is a growing community of faculty at over 100 institutions ranging from research centered to community colleges developing teaching materials across the curriculum including the geosciences. LibreTexts are totally cost free to students, institutions and faculty. LibreTexts' technology enables faculty members to easily and rapidly create OER textbooks and more optimized for their courses and students. The structure of LibreTexts solves two of the central problems limiting OER adoption: the time and effort that faculty need to assemble OER for their classes and dissemination. Libretexts are built by incorporating content from an extensive (largest on the net and growing) network of textbooks which extend across the curriculum that faculty can edit and enhance to meet their needs. LibreTexts effectively fulfills the ALMS framework for OER. All faculty have ACCESS to a suite of WYSIWYG HTML5 editing tools. The LEVEL of expertise needed is low. Drag and drop ReMixing can be done across the libraries. LibreTexts uses LaTeX based MathJAX for mathematical notation. One can directly translate images of equation into LaTeX with MathPix.com. Help is available when problems arise via a dedicated discussion group. All LibreTexts can be MEANINGFULLY edited and both the text and the source code are always available. All material is SELF SOURCED. HTML5 is used both for display and for revising and remixing. CSS sheets are available to authors and editors.

LibreTexts are easy to adopt and use, simple to optimize, and backed by educational research with advanced technologies. Features incorporate annotation (hypothes.is and NotaBene), computation (Jupyter) as well as 3D visualization and multimedia. LibreTexts supports import into LMSs, print on demand, and import from open eTextbooks. Since inception ten years ago, LibreTexts has been exponentially growing and currently reaches over 60 million students per year with 400,000 web hits per day.

Presentation Media

LibreTexts: A Community Platform for Adopting and Creating Geoscience OER (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 1.2MB Jul13 19)